BATH, England & BARCELONA—(BUSINESS WIRE)—February 16, 2009—
picoChip has announced the PC8219, a complete baseband solution for
eight-user WCDMA femtocells designed to run on its established PC202
processor chip. Two of picoChip’s lead customers are key development
partners for the product.

The PC8219 is a complete eight-user femtocell baseband implementation,
that is compliant with 3GPP Release 6 HSUPA and can support the new
femto-specific features from Release 8. Building on picoChip’s
field-proven software tested over a number of years of femtocell
development, the new solution will allow customers to use their existing
hardware platforms to rapidly produce robust, carrier-class products
suitable for the enterprise femtocell market.

“Eight-user femtocell deployment is emerging as a top priority for many
network operators, who see the potential to offer enhanced services to
business customers,” said Nigel Toon, president and CEO at picoChip. “By
combining larger capacity with the low cost and ease of installation of
the femtocell, we believe we can assist OEMs in addressing this
substantial and growing market.”

The new design extends picoChip’s field-proven range of software
reference designs based on its programmable picoArrayTM. This
flexible approach allows OEMs to get a head start in designing their
products, creating solutions that can be optimized and field proven.
Subsequent “hardening” into a system-on-chip platform can be undertaken
as required by cost and volume demands. The company offers solutions for
all of the major 3G standards, WiMAX, and recently demonstrated the
industry’s first LTE reference designs.

The PC8219 enables high-speed data, voice and multimedia services,
effectively complementing the functions of an eight-line PBX for small
enterprise use. It runs on a single PC202-10 picoArray device that
includes an integrated ARM9 core, providing a cost-effective, fully
programmable product that allows rapid customization, optimization and
upgrades. The solution is suitable for all backhaul architectures, most
importantly the new Iuh from 3GPP Release 8.

picoChip is the only semiconductor company focused solely on wireless
infrastructure currently shipping silicon. It provides baseband
solutions to address the key challenges of cost, development time and
flexibility for the next generation of wireless systems. The company’s
multi-core processors deliver a world-beating price/performance
combination. picoChip is the industry standard architecture for WiMAX
basestations, and is the leading supplier for the new wave of
femtocells, with support for TD-SCDMA, HSPA, LTE, cdma2000/EvDO and
GSM/GPRS/EDGE. The company’s products scale from femtocell access points
to picocells and sophisticated multi-sector carrier macrocells.

Editor's Note: “picoArray” is a registered trademark of picoChip. All
other trademarks and servicemarks are the property of their respective
owners.